The Entry of Randomized Assignment into the Social Sciences
Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/174451494942048090/The-entry-of-randomized-assignment-into-the-social-sciences http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26754 |
| Summary: | Although the concept of randomized
assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back
hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have
been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout
the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of
the need for careful comparison groups, albeit often without
the realization that randomization could be a particularly
clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more
crucial phase of this history, four separate but related
disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a
few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science,
clinical medicine, educational psychology, and social policy
(specifically political science). Randomized control trials
brought more rigor to fields that were in the process of
expanding their purviews and focusing more on causal
relationships. In the third phase, the 1950s through the
1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized
experiments in economics and elsewhere, in the lab and
especially in the field. |
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